Watch Morley Safer Lie in Real Time, on 60 Minutes

Michael, thou doth protest too much. You were teaching them how to walk up to influential people and make their acquaintance. Safer shorthanded that to "handshaking and eye contact" to make it simpler (and yes, to play into the geek stereotype). Welcome to television. If you're that thin-skinned, it's probably a medium you should stay away from.

I have an experience with 60 minutes that similarly gave me concern about the integrity of their reporting. I was born and raised in Las Vegas. When I was a teenager, 60 minutes did a report the message of which was something along the lines of "look at the poor youth of Las Vegas and how they are the victims of this grown up town with its neglectful gambling parents and are spending their time around casinos, etc. etc." Fine - for some reason people feel free to say rude things to people from Vegas about Vegas. Me and many I know have routinely heard things like, "I hate Vegas" and "How awful for you" when we say we're from there. The problem with the 60 minutes spot was that they did things like show an establishing shot of the strip and then cut to a bunch of teenagers hanging out in front of the Red Rock movie theaters that's many miles from the strip, but which had a blinking marquee that might look like something on the strip. It clearly was meant to appear like the kids were handing out on the strip. At the theater, they interviewed a girl I happened to know and I can't help but think that they cherry-picked her. She was a goth chick - very smart and loved to be odd and controversial. She said all kinds of things about her neglectful mother and other things that fed into their premise. 60 minutes has done some excellent reporting that's directly resulted in positive change and Vegas is not a shangri-la for kids, but the manner of that report has forever made me question the show's integrity.

That was a tv cheap shot and classic spin method using editing and voiceover. The media wanted a particular viewpoint expressed and in the process they offended somebody. I suspect they didn't mean to personally offend but they did. And so the blogger blogs about the offense. I think his reaction was reasonable and provides a good reminder of how media operates sometimes.

Interesting rant. So the author seems to completely "miss" the point of television and web based "news."<p><pre><code> Priority #1: Get ratings, everything else is subservient to this. Priority #2: Make your advertisers happy. Priority #3: Inform the public. </code></pre> Really, they are in that order. So if you're not working on #1 you're working on #2 and if you aren't working on that only then are you working on #3. Generally organizations stay away from making up news from whole cloth (as wonderfully lampooned in Dave Barry's "Big Trouble") but they 'film' to get stuff for someone's eyes to look at during the story, not necessarily to report on what is being filmed. Then they tell their story and some film editor goes and cuts in bits of video that 'look like' what the story is saying at the moment.<p>So the fact that they filmed a talk you gave can have nothing at all to do with the story they are writing. So complaining that they used footage of you doing one thing, while they talked about something else, well that is their right, you signed the release. Now if you had added a codicil which said "My only use my image when reporting on this talk about this topic." That would have prevented them from using your likeness in the story.<p>True story, had a friend at a sports bar when a film crew came in to pick up background video. After the fact they passed around releases for folks to sign, and my friend, being precise, added a clause like the above to his release. The station used the film on a story about sports and drinking and his face was a big blur :-) It was kind of hilarious but they take those things seriously.

As a long-time 60 minutes viewer I was actually a little shocked by what a dick Morely was last night. The piece really did seem very slanted against Thiel, with not much substance to back it up.

Business schools also teach students how to play golf, why doesn't he mock business schools for taking $200K off people to teach them to play golf?

60 Minutes has been burned in the past by people who did their own taping of an interview and were able to demonstrate that 60 Minutes cherry-picked.

tl;dr. Guy upset with the tiny snippet of himself on 60 minutes and how it was used to illustrate one of their points and not make his.

The armchair lawyer in me cringed reading this entry. Black Rock's lawyers could swoop in and eat the author for lunch, given the legally-strong words he's throwing around in his prose. This is dangerous, dangerous territory and take heed, folks; any chance you have for legal recourse in a case such as this is completely and irrevocably undermined by temperamental writing in the heat of the moment. This has liability written all over it for the author, in fact, and one should really think twice before squaring off against a legal team that has been in the trenches against <i>all of big tobacco</i> for the very same program.<p>Morley Safer is one of the old guard, one of the few journalists (the traditional meaning, not a blogger) left who has actually seen Vietnam. His work on <i>60 Minutes</i> is, typically, quite strong, and he has doubtlessly been on <i>60 Minutes</i> longer than this person has been alive. I find myself siding with Safer here instead of this blogger, and that's even with a deep-seated distaste for the media these days; that's merely on the credibility that <i>60 Minutes</i> has established, in my mind, and I really hope the author is prepared for many people with similar mindset to mine.<p>Namedropping your blog on Forbes isn't something that gives weight to your argument, since they've been comically easy to get for the last couple of years (troubling for Forbes's image, in my opinion). I don't think this entry will have the effect the author intended, as I'm more prone to indict the author instead of the person he wanted me to condemn.<p>EDIT: Clarifying a remark that confused my intent.